Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  Perry firmly but gently tried to push Jane away but she held on to his cock and began licking it.

  “Be cool, compadre,” Archer said. “From your point of view, this order is ideal.”

  “How the hell can only three episodes be ‘ideal?’”

  Jane now had his whole cock in her mouth and was sucking back and forth on it, making love to it. Perry was afraid he might shoot off right in the middle of a sentence with Archer Mellis and let out some kind of ungodly yell. He tried to concentrate now on television and forget about the sex. If it wasn’t one thing it was another.

  “We can produce those three hour episodes before the end of summer,” Archer explained. “You can serve as the real story consultant—not just in absentia, like we planned—and still be back for your classes in the fall.”

  “I said I’d teach summer school. To make up for the spring semester.”

  He looked down in fear that Jane might be getting upset by his even considering not going back for summer, might suddenly give him an angry bite, but she seemed to be succeeding in concentrating fully on what she was doing.

  “Summer school,” Archer said, so you could almost hear the smile in his voice. “That’s no big deal, is it?”

  “That’s not the point. It’s a commitment.”

  “You’ll get twenty-five hundred dollars a week as story consultant,” Archer said. “Also, we’ll want you to write a ‘bible’ for the whole series. That’s probably twenty grand. And I assume you’ll want to write one of the episodes. Probably the first one, to set things up like you want them. Guild scale for an hour episode now is fourteen thousand three hundred and eighteen.”

  Perry’s mind was whirling with the numbers. Twenty grand for bible, fourteen for episode, twenty-five hundred a week as story consultant, that was about ten grand a month for two, or would it be three, months? He reached down and tried to wrest his cock away from Jane, managing to get it out of her mouth but not out of her hands. He tried turning away from her but she yanked him back. He screamed.

  “Aggghhhh!”

  “You don’t like those numbers?” Archer asked. “Those are very good numbers, especially for a neophyte.”

  “The numbers are fine,” Perry gasped. “It’s just the change in plan; I wasn’t intending to stay out here past the end of this month—”

  “The other beauty of it is that you can choose the other writers, work with them yourself, train the ones you’d like to take over when you go back in the fall.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Jane,” Perry said.

  He tapped her on the head, trying to get her attention, but she was absorbed with the cock, had got it back in her mouth.

  “Of course you do!” Archer said. “And give her my congrats and my best. We’ll all go break a little bread when I get back, schmooze all this over.”

  “Great.”

  Jane was pulling him down, pulling him by the cock.

  “I’ve got to go now, Archer. Thanks for calling.”

  “Ciao, amigo.”

  Perry slung the phone receiver onto the cradle as he bent, slumping forward, onto Jane as she guided him by the cock, fitting it into her now as he cooperated, wanting to make her happy, wanting her to cooperate with him in agreeing to stay, they had to stay, there was no turning back, everything was coming together, love and money, it all was his, the moment was his, and he entered it fully, feeling the force that carried him now, the very thing Shakespeare meant when he said, “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Oh yes, this was the one, and he wondered, wincing with ecstasy as he crested, if Shakespeare had ever heard of what California surfers called the perfect wave.

  VII

  She already knew. Jane saw it coming before Perry did. She knew he wouldn’t want to go back to Vermont before the end of summer, and despite her own deep desire to return home—to literally “tend her own garden”—she agreed to stay on in Los Angeles another three months because it obviously meant so much to him.

  On one condition.

  “I need a home,” she said.

  “We have one. Remember? Back in Vermont.”

  “We’re not living in it. I’m not the kind of person who can live my life in a hotel room.”

  “It’s not your whole life, it’s just for the summer.”

  “You forgot the late winter and the spring. We’ve been living in a hotel room since January.”

  “It’s not a room, it’s a suite.”

  “All right, two rooms.”

  “Three, counting the kitchen, if you have to get technical.”

  “Kitchen-ette, if you have to get technical.”

  “And swimming pool. And maid service. Everything we need.”

  “It may be all you need, fella.”

  When she called him “fella” he knew she was really pissed. Maybe he was being an ass, after all. It was little enough she was asking, especially when he was rolling in dough. When he finally tallied up Archer’s numbers, they came out to something over sixty-four grand for the summer’s work. Of course he didn’t have it yet, but it was all coming in. Rolling in.

  “All right,” he said, “but I don’t have time to go around looking at real estate.”

  “I’ll do the looking,” Jane said. “When I find it, all you have to do is come give it your blessing.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Perry could hardly be expected to take time out from the lofty work he was now absorbed in, which was nothing less than writing the bible for the series. Not even the original Creator got to write his own Bible, but Perry, as the author of a pilot and thus by definition creator of the series that developed from it, had the opportunity to do just that. Of course it wasn’t a lengthy epic tome of spiritual and moral dimension, but rather a forty- or fifty-page handbook that served as background for writers who would be doing episodes of the show, explaining the original concept of it, history and brief biographies of the characters, so that such vital statistics as their dates of birth, high school and college graduation, marriage, and other important landmarks could be looked up if reference was needed to them, as well as their personality portraits, habits, strong and weak points, and anecdotes illustrating those things. Writing it was for Perry pure pleasure (to think he was getting paid twenty grand to do it!) as he filled in the full histories of these individuals he had conceived and brought to life. It made him feel more like a real creator, and he loved the sensation.

  Maybe, he thought, Jane should find us a place to rent in that section of Hollywood that was actually called Mount Olympus!

  The place she found that she thought was absolutely perfect was not on Mount Olympus, but in Topanga Canyon. That seemed awfully far from the studio, about an hour’s drive, but Perry was learning that distances didn’t mean anything to people in Los Angeles anyway. An hour and back to work was thought of as perfectly natural, and to question its convenience simply branded you as an inexperienced newcomer.

  The place was quite far up a rural-looking, winding road, and certainly seemed far removed from the studio, in atmosphere as well as distance.

  The house itself was quaint, a basic A-frame with wings added on each side, giving the effect of a small chalet. A hideaway. It sat on the top of a grassy hillside. From the edge of the property you could look down into the valley below, a picturesque spot with a stream running through it. The landscape looked oddly familiar—rocky and scrublike, with groves of trees—not the exotic palms of Southern California, but evergreens and oaks.

  “Don’t you just love it?” Jane asked, linking her arm in Perry’s.

  “It almost looks like New Hampshire,” he observed. “Maybe even Vermont.”

  “I know! Isn’t it amazing?” she asked, squeezing his arm.

  Perry nodded.

  “Amazing,” he said.

  Eagerly, like a child who is showing her favorite playmate a newly discovered secret hideout, Jane led him back of the house, to show him what w
as to be one of its master attractions: the vegetable garden.

  “I guess zucchini is everywhere,” Perry mused. “No matter where you go.”

  “I can do our summer casseroles.”

  “I bet there’s zucchini growing in the goddam arctic. Even under the glaciers. The dinosaurs died out, but nothing could kill the zucchini.”

  “The garden’s not even the best thing of all,” Jane said.

  “I should hope not.”

  She took him by the hand toward a sort of woods that seemed to border the property on one side. Tucked away, almost out of sight in a clump of trees, was a tiny one-room shack. It was formerly a woodshed, converted to a kind of studio.

  “I could use it as a darkroom!” Jane exulted. “There’s running water, a sink, everything. Isn’t it perfect?”

  Perry shifted from foot to foot.

  “Well, that is nice,” he had to admit.

  Jane kissed him and took him back to the main house.

  “Look, there’s even a fireplace,” she said, leading him into the living room. “And it’s all furnished. They’ll even leave their linen behind. And silverware.”

  Perry got out his pipe and packed the bowl.

  “So,” Jane asked, “don’t you think it’s like home?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Perry began to pace, feeling like a trapped animal. He lit up his pipe, sucking and drawing and puffing till great clouds of smoke were spewing forth, surrounding his head.

  “Let’s think about it,” he said.

  In silence, they went back to the car. In silence, they started driving down the winding road.

  “Negotiating this road at night,” said Perry, “with a little wine in the system, could be a little dicey.”

  “What’s really bugging you? Why don’t you like it?”

  “Look,” Perry said, trying for his most reasonable tone, “as long as we’re out here, in Southern California, don’t you think we might as well live in a place that’s typical of the region, instead of trying to find an imitation of New England?”

  “What would be ‘typical of the region’?”

  “Well, I suppose a house with a pool.”

  “A pool! You have to have your own private swimming pool now?”

  “What’s so weird about that? Lots of people out here have pools. It’s no big deal, it’s just part of the life-style.”

  “The ‘life-style’! Oh, brother. Shall we stop off and buy our gold chains? Shall we score some coke on the way home?”

  “I happen to like to swim. It’s my favorite exercise.”

  “Oh, come off it! You’re really into the scene out here. You love the whole thing—admit it!”

  “All right, for God sake, I’m guilty! Mea culpa! I even like what I’m doing!”

  The house they finally rented for the summer was a compromise. Jane gave up her dream of the New Englandy chalet with the garden and land and countrified atmosphere—even the little studio she could have used as a darkroom. Perry did feel badly about that particular point, but he graciously offered to rent her darkroom space away from home. She said it wasn’t that big a deal, she wasn’t sure she was going to do that much photography work out here anyway. Somehow she couldn’t get herself in the right mood. She planned to do a lot of reading.

  Perry in turn surrendered his own fantasy of a house. He had fallen in love with a pink stucco Moorish job with a kidney-shaped purple tile swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills that Jane protested was outlandish in taste as well as in price at $5,000 a month. They settled on a little gray frame bungalow in the unfashionable flats of Hollywood, down from the hills, on a quiet little street below Santa Monica Boulevard, for only $2,700. The house was small but comfortable, and most importantly the little backyard not only had a genuine redwood hot tub for Perry, but also a small patch of scratch soil that Jane got permission to use as a garden. She put in tomato plants and the inevitable zucchini, and planted a border of nasturtiums along one side of the neck-high green picket fence that enclosed the yard.

  Give a little, take a little. Fine. The compromise of living quarters was OK with Perry. What mattered was the work.

  It was thrilling.

  It was show biz.

  It was the opposite kind of work Perry had done all his life, that he had grown so bored with, so stale and stultified. Instead of mere contemplation, this was action. Instead of telling others how things had been done in the past, it was doing things now, in the moment, for showing in the future; and the audience, instead of a classroom, was a whole nation!

  Instead of the leisurely pace of the academy, the Monday-Wednesday-Fridays of classes at ten, two, and four, with office hours nestled in between and a couple of faculty and committee meetings salted in, this was every day all day into the evening, and every moment meaningful, dedicated, dramatic, devoted to getting every single detail right in order to produce the most magnificent show ever seen on American television!

  Perry felt so exalted by it all that he couldn’t even share his deepest emotions with Ned and Kenton for fear of sounding like the star-struck schoolboy he knew in some delicious way he had become. Once, walking across the lot back to his office, passing other shows in production, a group of men dressed as Cherokees, a couple of beautiful women in the full regalia of Old Western dancehall girls, he smiled and waved and felt with a lump in his throat the inspirational lines from Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

  And he was young again. At forty-three, he had rediscovered his youth.

  He woke every morning before the alarm and bounced out of bed and into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, drinking it by the window of the living room with the first cool, moist air of morning wafting in, and took a fresh cup and a glass of orange juice to Jane, switching on the TV to “Good Morning, America” and humming along with the theme song.

  Jane good-naturedly grumbled, marveling that this was the same, husband who at home she had to wake every morning herself, coaxing him from sleep as she would a drugged derelict coming out of a coma. He told her once way back then in that other life that waking each morning he felt as if he were reenacting the whole history of the human race, rising not just from the sleep of the previous night but from the protozoic slime, pushing upwards through aeons into the dawn of civilization and finally emerging, exhausted from it all, into the bleary new day.

  His exhaustion now came at night. Where at home he was just getting into his stride around the cocktail hour, and hitting the sack around midnight or one o’clock, now after dinner he was bushed, done in, limp as a rag. In all ways. He couldn’t even think about sex, except on Saturday night. Even then, he had to, as it were, “get himself up for it,” and even during the act he found his mind straying to thoughts of “The First Year.”

  Nor was it any wonder Perry was distracted from everything in life not relating to the show. His position as story consultant for the series gave him a great deal of responsibility. It also gave him a lot of influence.

  For the first time in his life, he had influence over the lives of others—not just in giving a passing or a failing grade to a student, but in affecting the careers and incomes of other adult human beings. What made this even more awesome was that these people were similar to him in talent, ambition, and sensitivity—even in vulnerability. They were writers.

  They flocked to special screenings set up for groups of them at the studio. The word went out all over town, through the trades and the grapevine and calls to agents, that a new show was in the works, an hour drama series rumored to be that rarest of all birds, a quality prime-time network series. Since the show had not yet been on the air, potential writers had to see the pilot in order to know what the series was about. They had to know who the characters were and what sort of situations they might be involved in before they could pitch an appropriate story line for consideration. To inform themselves of these matters they duti
fully trooped to screenings of the pilot, armed with notebooks and pencils and hope.

  Those who were not invited to attend, who did not have agents to submit their names and samples of their work for consideration, called and sent in work on their own. The inundation of writers grew in geographic scope as well as variety of applicants and ideas when one of the wire services carried a small item about Perry, the college teacher and short-story writer who had originated a new television show.

  Aspiring writers not only sent in scripts they had written, but poems and verse plays, biographies and musicals, comedy sketches and magazine articles, inspirational essays from religious publications and feature stories on beloved pets that had been published in small-town weeklies. There were telephone calls from writers who claimed to be old buddies of Perry’s from college or the army or summers in the south of France or winters in the Alps or other such places where in fact he had never been in his life. There were those who swore they were best friends or sweethearts of people Perry had known in those or other places throughout his apparently teeming past, or friends of mysterious relatives who had allegedly assumed other identities.

  Of the scores of inquiries and applications and supplications, the culmination came with the appearance of a wild-eyed man with a flaming red beard who gained entry to Perry’s office posing as a window washer and claiming to be a psychic messenger of the late seer Edgar Cayce, dispatched from the logging camp where he had worked for five years solely on the sacred mission of writing an episode of “The First Year’s the Hardest.”

  Security guards and efficient secretaries accustomed to such entreaties disposed of most of the eager but uninvited applicants, but that still left nearly a hundred or so valid, working professional writers vying for what came down to three script assignments. Or two, if Perry chose to write the first episode of the series himself. As story consultant, it was his own choice. He was not used to all these choices.

  Thankfully, the selection of the writers was not his alone; it was a decision made jointly with Kenton and Ned, and had to have Archer’s approval, as well as the network’s.